Sci­en­tists say in or­der to main­tain a nat­u­ral bal­ance on Earth, one that pro­vides the en­vi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions upon which all life de­pends, the amount of car­bon diox­ide con­tained in the at­mos­phere should be be­low 350 parts per mil­lion (ppm). At the be­gin­ning of hu­man civ­i­liza­tion our at­mos­phere nat­u­rally con­tained around 275 ppm.

Hu­man­ity’s grow­ing re­liance on coal, oil, and nat­u­ral gas, or fos­sil fu­els, spiked tremen­dously the amount of car­bon diox­ide be­gin­ning in the late 20th cen­tury. To­day, we have 404 ppm of CO2 in the at­mos­phere, and its ris­ing ev­ery year, mov­ing us in­creas­ingly far­ther away from the 350 ppm goal.

These num­bers are stag­ger­ing, even down­right de­press­ing. Un­for­tu­nately, cli­mate change ap­pears as if it is here to stay. Patagon Journal’s Cli­mate Change in Patag­o­nia project, cre­ated in part­ner­ship with Earth Jour­nal­ism Net­work, ex­plores many of the mul­ti­ple im­pacts of cli­mate change now and in the fu­ture for Patag­o­nia as the planet en­ters into a new and haz­ardous era.

Two ar­ti­cles in this se­ries ex­plore en­ergy pro­duc­tion. Grant Devine presents eco­nom­i­cally and en­vi­ron­men­tally vi­able sources of re­new­able en­ergy within Patag­o­nia, while Pa­trick Lynch un­veils Chile’s na­tional en­ergy pol­icy and its of use cli­mate change as cover for push­ing large-scale hy­dro­elec­tric de­vel­op­ment on the coun­try’s rivers and thereby en­gen­der­ing even more en­vi­ron­men­tal prob­lems.

Martin Jac­ques, a cli­ma­tol­o­gist, ex­plains the heat­waves in Patag­o­nia. Tem­per­a­ture in­creases con­trib­ute to per­haps the most vis­i­ble ef­fect of cli­mate change in Patag­o­nia, glacial melt, pre­sented in this se­ries in Jonathan Byers’ “Mem­o­ries of ice,” while an­other story ex­plores glacial lake out­burst floods (GLOF), a dan­ger­ous phe­nom­e­non oc­cur­ring with greater fre­quency at the Baker River in Ay­sen Patag­o­nia.

In “Mys­tery whale deaths,” sci­en­tists link the mass mor­tal­ity of 337 sei whales in 2015 to a harm­ful al­gal bloom (HAB), which may hap­pen with in­creas­ing fre­quency and sever­ity due to cli­mate change. Fi­nally, we move from the ocean to the for­est where cli­mate change may spark an eco­log­i­cally harm­ful trend of non-na­tive tree plan­ta­tions, an is­sue ex­plored by jour­nal­ist Pa­tri­cio Se­gura.

This col­lab­o­ra­tion of sci­en­tists, jour­nal­ists, and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists (read the com­plete ver­sion of these sto­ries at www. ecopatag­o­nia.og) pro­vides the sto­ries be­hind the num­bers and shows us that cli­mate change isn’t some­thing that’s go­ing to hap­pen—it’s al­ready hap­pen­ing. And yet we must keep hope. In De­cem­ber 2015 at the United Na­tions Cli­mate Sum­mit in Paris, 189 coun­tries vol­un­tar­ily pledged to re­duce car­bon emis­sions over the next sev­eral decades. Cli­mate ac­tion is now a global man­date. We can’t af­ford to con­tinue busi­ness as usual. Pol­i­tics play a part. Economics plays a part. And most im­por­tantly, in­formed cit­i­zens play a part.